The Sumner School District office used to be an easily spotted landmark on Wood Avenue, thanks to a pair of spotlights that shone on its entryway through the night. Tonight, and every night since the beginning of the school year, the office sits in the dark as just one of several new cost-saving measures.

A grant-funded contract employee is helping the Sumner School District – as well as the cities of Bonney Lake, Sumner and Buckley – make the most efficient use of their utilities. School district officials say they hope the savings will help them avoid cuts in education-related portions of the budget.

The contractor, Jay Donnaway, is a resource conservation manager with Sound Environmental Consulting. The funding for his position with the district and cities comes from a $75,000 federal Department of Energy grant through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, as well as a $28,000 a year – for three years – grant through Puget Sound Energy.

“Last spring, the city of Bonney Lake’s executive assistant, Brian Hartsell, asked if we would be interested in partnering on this (DOE grant through Washington State University) offered to the cities,” Executive Director of Business Services Debbie Campbell said. “Bonney Lake needed to have a partner, and that could include schools, because they needed a certain amount of utility costs to be eligible.”

They and the other cities worked out a deal. Donnaway began working out of the main district office in September and the district secured the greatest percentage of his time, Campbell said.

But because the school district is a utilities client of both Bonney Lake and Sumner, some changes affect all of the interdependent parties.

“When we sat down at the table, I told everyone ‘You may win some, you may lose some, but let’s get it right,'” Donnaway said.

An example he provides comes out of the Auburn School District and the city of Auburn, his previous clients. Donnaway found that Auburn Riverside High School’s water account had been improperly placed in the city account, overcharging the district $160,000. It was a loss for the city, but the refund gained jobs for the district.

Donnaway has a background in solid waste management and a passion for energy efficiency that seeps into his personal life – he owns a Volkswagen Eclectic that he recently finished converting into an electric car. His eyes light up when he shows a graph demonstrating a 10 percent drop in electricity use for Sumner High School during the year so far, compared with the previous year. That change reverses a years-long trend of rising utilities costs at that school; the 2009-10 school year had a 21 percent spike in electricity costs over the previous year.

“Utilities are often something that is not a priority in many organizations because they’re in the background of operations,” he said. “But you need to (be able to) turn on the lights.”

Donnaway’s tasks hit on three general fronts: familiarizing himself with utility patterns, finding and correcting inefficiencies in the system, and finding and correcting inefficiencies in everyday human use of utilities.

As part of the Puget Sound Energy grant, Donnaway has access to the company’s database of utility consumption and costs, a system he is “becoming intimately familiar with.”

The database not only shows costs, but the energy or water consumption that should be associated with those costs, allowing him to see where costs should be for each Sumner district building compared to similar customers.

The system has already allowed him to spot an instance of excessive water consumption at Lakeridge Middle School, which pointed to a pipe leak that has since been corrected, Campbell said. A faulty energy meter at Victor Falls Elementary School was similarly flagged and corrected.

The district’s waste pick-up has been drastically reorganized by Donnaway. All garbage pick-up services have been changed to on-call service, meaning the district pays for pick-up when their dumpsters are full, as opposed to regular – and regularly charged – pick-ups. Recycling has moved entirely to “single stream” pick-up, meaning school employees don’t need to spend time sorting recyclables. Dumpsters are now locked down to prevent dumping from outside parties.

“The other element of the equation is behavioral, meaning how people use lights and (heating and air conditioning),” Donnaway said. “And a lot of it can seem counter-intuitive. For example, propping open a door to cool down an assembly actually makes it hotter because the system is responding to the colder temperature.”

The rewards for changing behaviors can be significant, as he demonstrated to the district school board at the Jan. 12 meeting.

“Even a 1 percent drop in utility use should gain $20,000 for student learning,” he said.